ASRock joined the likes of ASUS, Gigabyte, and others, in missing its motherboard sales target for 2012. According to the latest figures with DigiTimes, the company shipped 7.5 million motherboards in 2012, which is quite a bit short of its modest target of 9 million, given its 2011 shipments of 8 million.

According to industry analysts, the Pegatron subsidiary is expected to see a flat performance at best, in 2013, despite the fact that Intel is launching a brand new socket (LGA1150), prompting higher motherboard sales. In 2012, Intel retained its LGA1155 socket from the 2011-launched "Sandy Brige" platform, and inter-compatibility between its 2nd and 3rd generation Core processors may have stunted sales of its 7-series chipset products.

given the economic climate & The fact that crucial everyday goods like food, electricity, gas & Petrol have ballooned in price, Id say that there is no shame for not meeting targets.

People just dont have that much disposable income to splash out on new hardware after they have paid all the bills. Cars are the worst when it comes to guzzling your cash, you need to pay insurance fee's, road tax, petrol tax and for the actual petrol you use which is already just rediculously priced. not to forget general maintenance costs ontop of all that

I really think the demand for pc stuff is flat because the hardware is already more powerful than the software. What's the point of upgrading?
And the smartphones and tablets and all the other gadgets are slowing eating away at the pc market.
And the younger generation isn't into the pc as much as they used to be. They want portability as with a phone.

And the big one...economy is terrible for most of the world.
Everything is just so outrageous as far as price.
There has to come a time when eating is more important than computing.
Gasoline, heating fuels, food, medical insurance, and on and on.

I personally didn't buy a single motherboard in 2012... I had no need to. AsRock is always on the bottom of my list anyways.

But overall not really surprised, the market is down so this is to be expected.

I see no reason to upgrade my computer for a few years... but I don't keep up with the times and I don't see the need to play the newest games the minute they come out. If I ever play them I will play them in a year or two after release. Crysis 3 looks cool, might buy it for $5 in 2015, bout the time I have a computer I can play it on.

It is not the worst results for shipping, it isn't like they are going to go under yet and besides they have been producing good stuff as of late. I think the overall problem is the economy worldwide, people into more portable stuff (well the new generations at least) and Intel has decided to cap their systems at the same computing power with the only significant improvements being in architecture performance and power efficiency (and maybe the 'exclusive' use of a newly released features like Thunderbolt or PCI-E 3.0) so upgrading will now hold less improvements if you did it on a year basis unless something that is actually significant comes out.

Honestly I feel ASRock really stepped it up lately, I'm very pleased with a lot of their boards lately. I've been using quite a few in place of Asus to help cut costs down a bit for customers, I have very little to complain about, even ended up using one in a new build for my brother, considered picking up a Z77 Extreme 4 for myself.